Space Chefs from Space by 7Gnomes - Team Lead, Creative Director, 2D Artist
Space Chefs from Space is a third-person tower defense game with farming elements. Play as G-Ma and protect your secret recipe book from waves of alien chefs by planting crops and building vegetable themed turrets!
This project was my third year capstone. We were told to build a game from concept to golden master over the course of two semesters, one for planning and the other for execution. I was elected team lead and given both the roles of 2D artist and creative director. This meant I was in charge of the game's design and any hand drawn art. This challenged me to create concept pieces, UI assets, character designs, pixel art, and full colour illustrations on top of managing the other six members of my team to build a finished product in four months.
Enemy Character Concepts
Concept art for the enemies is inspired by the Behemoth games such as Castle Crashers and older cartoons like Invader Zim. The idea is that all the aliens are clones of the manager that he's altered to do their jobs. I wanted the aliens to pop in the night environment and easily display their role to the player.
Environment Concepts
Early concept art for the game's environment. It was through this art that we realized the corn might make the game look dull because of its brown colour. For the final game it was changed to green.
Level Design
I wanted the level to mimic the shape of a crop circle because the aliens were the ones creating it and that's something that aliens are known for. This centralized design also allowed us to keep the player running back to the middle to fill up their water tank which is one of the key mechanics of the game and thus should be at the "heart" of the level. It also makes it easier for a player to traverse to where they need to go once refilling their tank as they have all options available to them.
Main Menu/Game Over Backgrounds
Full colour illustrations used as the background for the main menu and game over screen respectively. I really like the composition and the say the characters pop from their backgrounds.
Cinematic Comics
These are just a handful of the comics I created for the game. I started creating pixel art in my free time just before this project began and used the game as an opportunity to improve on it.
Icons
Some pixel icons used in the UI of the game.
In-Game Ui Screenshots
Some shots of the Ui I designed and created for Space Chefs. Notice the consistent use of orange and blue to reflect the main character's own colour scheme. I also used the pixel art to mimic a screen's output.
T-Shirt Designs
Some simple t-shirts designed to act as merchandise for Space Chefs. These shirts allowed me to explore the game's characters in ways the game wouldn't be getting across.
